Viewing profile — yutopia

This is super interesting: http://en.ritsumei.ac.jp/news/detail/?id=278 https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.0034... Apparently he showed his "rotating snake" im…

Not quite sure what you’re getting at, I never said there were no differences between cultures. However the differences are often overstated, and with regards to Japanese culture s…

If we set aside superficial differences such as language and mannerisms, I never thought we're all that different from Americans, Germans, etc. — we're just humans living in the sa…

Yes! Just checked, and the most popular model on kakaku.com (Japanese price comparison site) right now is around $300. Ours was around $400, maybe not the best but we're pretty sat…

"Fuzzy" rice cookers have been around for decades, I (and my parents, and pretty much everyone I know) have always regarded it as a marketing slogan. That's not to say high-end ric…

A rather vague post. > meritocracies work so well … because they produce peak performance Does the author have any evidence for this? Supposing that this is true, does meritocracy …

Huh the author claims low density living is more sustainable, but I don’t see how that’s supported by the underlying paper (Lenzen et al. 2004). It presents some interesting (albei…

Fugu is good! Eating them as a show of bravado is a tourist thing I think (probably inspired by articles like these), here we eat them because we think they’re good. They’re in sea…

Wow this looks promising, wonder if the technique can be used to cheaply prototype optics. Stratasys has VeroClear but material properties aren’t ideal (e.g., lack of heat resistan…

Thanks, so Finnegans Wake is considered a modernist novel? Interesting. Totally out of my depth here but it seems so much at odds with modernist ideas in other artistic disciplines…

So Wells = modernist and Joyce = (early) postmodernist? This all looks familiar and relevant to our times, the struggle between one who believes in a shared reality and possibility…

So you say it wasn’t a joke, you wrote the original comment in Japanese because it was your sincere opinion and you wanted the researchers to understand. Not sure I follow. If that…

FWIW this is the original comment (now flagged): この奴ら、ね、素敵な白人女性の彼女どうしても欲しがってて、そういう付き合ってくれる女性に合えなくて、やっとこのエッチなソフトを作ったに違いない。 何とか役に立つ仕事をしたほうがいい。 People can come to their own conclusion…

There was an opinion piece on PNAS a few years ago that argued just that, no hard evidence though: https://www.pnas.org/content/113/34/9384

I think the general trend of researchers becoming more media-savvy is great. But I also get the sense that researchers are increasingly choosing to work on Twitter-friendly topics …

My guess is that it’s an inside joke of some kind, targeted at English speakers with some knowledge of Japanese. When I was a kid my classmates would often ask me to teach them dir…

Terrible grammar, but probably means something like the following: "These guys were desperate to find hot white girlfriends, but nobody would date them so they resorted to writing …

Not really, I’m not cooking anything remotely fancy and we have all sorts of technology to help us nowadays. For example, cooking rice is simply a matter of putting rice and water …

That's a good point, I cook my rice with all kinds of millet, barley, and seeds mixed in. My grandparents would probably think that's backwards, why would I eat barley when I could…

After years of experimentation, lately I’ve decided that eating like my grandparents (i.e., eating like a traditional Japanese) is the easiest way to keep myself lean and healthy. …

Academia has become tremendously cutthroat but it still operates under the assumption that everyone acts honorably. Perhaps that’s no longer sustainable, but what is the solution? …

Huh I admit my impressions may not reflect the current state of things.

Knowing the state of English education here I wouldn’t be entirely surprised if the story was true, especially seeing how the original blog post was written by a tutor in (rather r…

I agree with the overall point that design is about more than looks, but my impression is that design as practiced by the IDEO / Stanford d.school / design thinking crowd is a quit…

A Japanese tweet/blog aiming to stir up outrage among the “concerned” Japanese public, being taken up by an English-language website for their latest “weird Japan” article. Being J…